Can Labour learn to love the market?

This article was first written for and published by The Critic

Labour Foreign Secretary and NATO founder Ernest Bevin had the Labour Party as having been born out of the bowels of the Trades Union Congress. Yet for a party so institutionally bound to a collective mass movement, the shadows of personality loom large across its history. Tony Benn was prone to insist, without a hint of irony, that politics should be about “issues not personalities”, but markedly more often for the left than the right, individuals came to symbolise the issues.

For many decades, far more important than whether a policy was admired by Tony Blair or championed by Jeremy Corbyn was whether it had been endorsed by Nye Bevan, the founder of the NHS, and was approved by his disciples to sit within the cannon of “Bevanism”. Indeed both Blair and Corbyn were wont to seek to cloak themselves in the “Mantle of Nye”, a garment that Harold Wilson donned as emphatically as he lit his pipe when facing accusations of “selling out” Labour’s traditional values. Not for nothing did Wilson and his fellow Bevanite, Employment Secretary Barbara Castle, name their planned trade union reform plan of 1968 “In Place of Strife”, a deliberate echo of Bevan’s most celebrated tract “In Place of Fear”...

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